This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In testing electronic components, such as integrated circuits (ICs), a testing apparatus is often utilized to assess a component's performance under thermal stress conditions. The test procedure requires the temperature of the electronic component to be maintained at set points to allow characterization of the chip's performance at several temperatures. To this end, various techniques and devices have been developed to facilitate the maintenance and setting of different temperature points. These techniques and devices, for example, include forced air convection systems, and dual liquid conduction systems. In the latter, a proportion of hot and cold liquids are mechanically metered to affect the desired forcing temperature. In other techniques, the electronic component may be thermally coupled to a heater and a heat sink with a chamber with a liquid flowing through the chamber
Regardless of the particular technique, the use of fluids and/or air for achieving and maintaining the set temperatures points, as well as for pick-up and placement of components under test, necessitates the availability of devices that can accommodate air, vacuum and/or fluidic chambers, ports, inlets and outlets in conjunction with electrical connections and additional circuitry such as temperature, vacuum and pressure sensors. Such devices are usually manufactured from cast aluminum, machined aluminum or steel, and pipe or tubing configurations. Some manufacturers may also offer stacked acrylic ported manifolds but lack the associated electronic circuitry and are expensive to produce.